10 Top Tools for Novelists
The software featured in this article is designed to meet the specialised needs of a budding novelist. There's the finest open source distraction-free tools, software designed to create visual novels, and tools to help capture and visualise ideas.

Openbravo is an ERP business solution for small and medium sized companies. Its database structure is originally based on Compiere. Openbravo uses a fully Web based client/server architecture, and can be used from any Web browser. It has support for PostgreSQL and Oracle database back-ends. It is currently available in Spanish, English, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian. Read more

Delta3D is an open source game and simulation engine. It is a fully-featured game engine appropriate for a wide variety of uses including training, education, visualization, and entertainment. Read morehot

Godot is a fully featured, open source, MIT licensed, game engine. It focuses on having great tools, and a visual oriented workflow that can export to PC, Mobile and Web platforms with no hassle. The editor, language and APIs are feature rich, yet simple to learn, allowing you to become productive in a matter of hours. hot

The Sauerbraten (Cube 2) engine is an advanced and complete originally open source engine available today, with many novel features unavailable elsewhere. Its main strength is its very productive content pipeline which is especially attractive to smaller companies making casual or serious games. Read morehot

ScummVM is a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files. The clever part about this: ScummVM just replaces the executables shipped with the game, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed. Read morehot

Unigine is a cross-platform real-time 3D engine. It stands on the cutting edge of the technology and provides the ultimate power for interactive virtual worlds (modern games and virtual reality systems). hot

Unity is a flexible and powerful development platform for creating multiplatform 3D and 2D games and interactive experiences. It's a complete ecosystem for anyone who aims to build a business on creating high-end content and connecting to their most loyal and enthusiastic players and customers. hot

The Agar project produces a portable and window system independent graphics toolkit for SDL and OpenGL. In addition to a fully functional GUI toolkit, a set of higher-level graphics related libraries are also included in Agar.

The Annchienta project is a free, single-player graphical 2D tile-based RPG. The game takes place in an isometric fantasy world, where you battle to complete your epic and tragic quest. Explore the world, fight monsters and unravel the dark secrets of the past. Read more

AzureGE is a multi-platform game engine. It is implemented mainly by using OpenGL and OpenAL. It has built-in support for I/O, threading, networking, particle system, material generator, texture generator, and mesh/terrain generator. It is intended mainly for creating Role Playing Game (RPG). However, it can also be adapted for other types of game.

Castle Game Engine is a cross-platform 3D game engine written in Object Pascal. It includes a flexible system of 3D objects, with out-of-the-box levels, items, intelligent creatures, and more. Rendering and processing of 3D models in X3D, VRML, Collada, and other formats is implemented. Many graphic effects are available, including shadows, bump mapping, shaders, mirrors, and screen effects.

The Crate Game Engine is a game engine that is designed to make creating games trivial. The rendering engine and scripting engine are removed from the game engine to make the specialization of games as easy as possible.

Cycon Online Gaming Engine is an Open Source project aimed at simplifying the creation of online video games. Users can make their own video games with no programming experience necessary, with a target audience ranging from children to gurus.

Drome Engine is a 3D game engine that's written in C++ and uses OpenGL for graphics rendering. It's currently under constant development and features include: Vertex and pixel shader support, Dynamic lightmaps, Stenciled shadow volumes, and sky domes.

Emotion Engine is a 3d game engine based on plib of the 3d graphics, lua for the scripting engine and xml for the world files. Originally the engines intent was to demo and create a tutorial on how to use plib for new game developers.

Exult is a project to create an Ultima 7 game engine that runs on modern operating systems, capable of using the data and graphics files that come with the game. Exult aims to let those people who own Ultima 7 (copyright 1993) play the game on modern hardware, in as close to (or perhaps even surpassing) its original splendor as is possible.

FIFE is a cross-platform 2.5D game creation framework written in C++ and Python. Games can be created with a combination of engine, editor tools, game specific scripts, and game content (e.g. maps, graphics, and sounds).

Flare (Free/Libre Action Roleplaying Engine) is a simple, open source, single-player 2D-isometric action RPG engine. Flare is not a reimplementation of an existing game or engine. Rather than building a very abstract, robust game engine, the goal of this project is to build several real games and harvest an engine from the common, reusable code. The first game, in progress, is a fantasy dungeon crawl. Read more

Flexible Isometric Fallout-like Engine (FIFE) is a next-generation 2D engine that aims to be modern and have strong modding support. It supports different platforms, OpenGL, alphablending, and multiple resolutions.

FreeSG is a portable, high-level 3D engine with an emphasis on generality. It is designed as a component to be integrated, as opposed to an application framework. Its goal is to support applications ranging from small 3D games running on portable consoles to large simulations that must be rendered photorealistically using fourth-generation graphics hardware.

Invasores was first designed as a proof of concept of which language would be faster to develop games. After that, some people started to use it just for fun, and development continues this way. It should evolve into a game engine for simple games, probably for kids.

The Irrlicht Engine is an open source high performance realtime 3D engine written and usable in C++ and also available for .NET languages. It is completely cross-platform, using D3D, OpenGL and its own software renderer.

Legendary Orthogonal Virtual Environment, nicknamed "LÖVE" is an open-source 2D game engine which uses the versatile Lua scripting language to create dynamic gaming experiences. It relies on OpenGL graphics and the SDL interface library to allow for cross-platform implementation and is an all-encompassing gaming environment for the development and enjoyment of 2D games.

Official Hamster Republic Role Playing Game Construction Engine: A free utility that you can use to create your own RPG game in a style similar to the classic Final Fantasy games on the NES and SNES which have so shaped the RPG genre. Read more

OpenRelativity is an open-source toolkit to simulate effects of special relativity by varying the speed of light. Developed by the MIT Game Lab, it contains open-source code for public use with the free and paid versions of the Unity engine.

OpenXcom is an engine for the game UFO: Enemy Unknown (X-Com: UFO Defense in the USA). UFO: Enemy Unknown is a popular strategy videogame made by Mythos / Microprose, where you take control of the X-Com organization to fight off the alien menace invading Earth.

Quad-Ren is a resolution independent 2D graphics engine that aims to ease the development of bitmap-based applications, primarily games. It will run regardless of screen resolution or aspect ratio, and works flawlessly with tiling window managers. It rectifies many of the issues with older methods of 2D game development such as color key transparency (which inevitably leads to aliasing) and having to draw sprites in a specific order, which Quad-Ren handles using alpha transparency and layers respectfully. It is programmed in, and usable from C++, with a simple object-oriented API and a small, well documented, easy to edit code base.

QuakeForge is a 3D graphics game engine based on id Software's legendary Quake and QuakeWorld game engine. Our purpose? To improve the state of the game by improving the engine and making it accessable to the largest number of players we can.

RealmForge GDK is a cross-platform game development framework and toolkit written in Mono/C# and powered by the Axiom 3D engine. It will allow for the rapid development of cutting-edge script & data-driven games and MMORPGs.

REminiscence is a rewrite of the engine used in the game Flashback from Delphine Software. This program is designed as a cross-platform replacement for the original executable and uses the SDL library.

sge2d, also known as SDL Game Engine, is a platform-independent 2D game programming framework for C programmers with the least possible dependencies for easy porting and with a focus on easy API calls and the requirement of commercial programmers

Soya 3D is a very high level 3D engine for Python. Soya aims at being to 3D what Python is to programming : fast to learn, easy to use, while keeping good performance! Our goal is to propose a complete architecture to realise free (GPL) games with professional quality entirely in Python.

Spineless Jelly is a generic cross-platform 3D game engine implemented in Python with Pyrex optimizations. Focus is on flexibility, clean design and ease of use, not pure speed or bleeding edge graphics.

Stratagus is a free cross-platform real-time strategy gaming engine. It includes support for playing over the internet/LAN, or playing a computer opponent. The engine is configurable and can be used to create games with a wide-range of features specific to your needs.

The Gamebook Engine is a cross-platform engine for writing gamebooks, such as the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series or the "Lone Wolf" series. TGE can interpret scripts that use the "Hyena" gamebook format.

Wurld is yet another free 3D gaming engine. It is light, fast, has minimal external requirements, and is still very immature. It is Python scriptable, including support for generating models using 3D turtle graphics.

ZIG is a free, LGPL licensed, extendable client-server game engine. Besides networking, it provides support for other features like: logging, an interactive debug console, timing control (for client framerates and server packet rates), automatic downloading of game files from server to client, etc.

Matching Content

Share this Page

Submit this page to popular social networks such as Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon and more.